Focus

Terror against Muslims is not accidental

By Zafarul-Islam Khan,
The Milli Gazette

Published Online: Apr 27, 2013

Print Issue: 16-30 April 2013

Indian police is biased against Muslims. This is a known fact and Muslims have been for decades crying hoarse about it. Even an IPS officer, Vibhuti Narain Das (now vice chancellor of a university), has authoritatively stated this fact of daily Muslim life in India. Cases of Hashimpura & Maliana (22 May, 1987), Beemmapalli (17 May, 2009), Forbesganj (3 June, 2011), Moradabad (6 July, 2011), Gopalgarh (14 September, 2011), Rudrapur (2 Oct., 2011) and more recently Dhule (6 January, 2013) are only some glaring examples of police bias against Muslims. But apart from lip service, nothing concrete has been done to stop and detoxify this menace of an utterly communalized and biased force. Similarly, other agencies like Intelligence Bureau, suffer from the same malaise. These forces have been over the decades infiltrated by RSS elements who use their positions to enforce Sangh agenda to make life miserable for minorities, especially for Muslims. This bias was seen all along in the riots since early 1960s.

BJP-led NDA’s jumping on the American terror bandwagon in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 9-11, although there was no such threat in India at the time, allowed these biased forces to intensify their war on the Muslim community using the terror plank. Ever since, thousands, may be upto 15000, Muslim youths have been arrested on fake terror charges. Most were released after days or weeks of torture, but others were implicated in multiple terror cases, at times 30 cases, and the only evidence in almost all cases is a confessional statement obtained in custody using third degree torture which is banned internationally and India is a signatory of the international covenant banning torture. Doctored narco tests have also been widely used against these youths.

Hundreds of Muslim youth have been acquitted by courts after spending as much as 18 years in jail. Their lives and careers stand ruined but the government has no plans to compensate them or prosecute the police and IB officers who implicated them by faking proofs. At present, a few thousand Muslim boys still languish in jails undergoing a very slow judicial process. More arrests are made every now and then on some pretext or the other.

In the meantime, Maharasthra Anti-Terror Squad, then headed by Hemant Karkare, cracked the Malegaon blast case of 2008 under which many Muslim youth were already in jails. It turned out to be the handiwork of Hindutva terror outfits which had devised an ingenious plan, in cahoots with elements in the Police and IB, that bombs would be exploded in Muslim localities and places of worship, Muslims will get killed and injured by their dozens but Muslim youth would be arrested for the same crime. It turned out that umpteen Hindutva outfits like Bajrang Dal, Sanatan Sanstha, Abhinav Bharat, were actively engaged in terror activities which were executed in such a clever way that only Muslims would get arrested. Though over a dozen low level Hindutva workers have been arrested, the real masterminds and financiers are out although their names, like RSS top leader Indresh Kumar and VHP top leader Parveen Togadia and many others including army officers, appear in the chargesheets of the Malegaon 2008 and Ajmer blast cases but they have not been even interrogated, let alone arrested. Places like Bhonsala Military Schools at Nasik and Nagpur and Aakanksha Resort in Pune, where Hindutva terrorists in their thousands were trained, have not been touched. So much for secular India.

This article appeared in The Milli Gazette print issue of 16-30 April 2013 on page no. 1

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